On the day after Halloween in 1950, during an unseasonably hot afternoon in Washington, D.C., President Harry Truman was napping at Blair House while the White House was being renovated. At 2:20 p.m., Puerto Rican natives Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola approached calmly from opposite directions, each with a German automatic pistol under his jacket, and opened fire on the Secret Service agents guarding the house. Novelist Stephen Hunter, a Pulitzer Prize–winning former film critic for the Washington Post, and lawyer and former Baltimore Sun journalist John Bainbridge team up to examine these Puerto Rican nationalists, the agents they faced, and their 38-second pitched battle, as well as why this near-assassination soon evaporated from the public consciousness.